


take it slow (in this home on ice)

by dmbsnr



Category: Men's Hockey RPF
Genre: M/M, Slow Burn, gritty as a conduit for desire, moronsexuals
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-21
Updated: 2019-07-21
Packaged: 2020-07-10 03:34:38
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,318
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19899175
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dmbsnr/pseuds/dmbsnr
Summary: This is it, he thinks. This is how he dies. By the fuzzy orange hand of his fucking mascot.





	take it slow (in this home on ice)

**Author's Note:**

> disclaimer that if you are/know anyone in this please click away. this is not in any way representative of the people mentioned and is purely nonsense spin-off fiction. 
> 
> title from ‘in this home on ice’ by clap your hands and say yeah. three cheers for bands located in philly.
> 
> the majority of this is horrifically self indulgent gritty monster description and summer delirium. sorry in advance.

Pats is still shit-scared of Gritty.

And, to his credit, he’ll openly admit that to anyone who presses him on it. Not that anyone does. Barely anyone on the team even like, talks about it. And if they do, it’s with a specific brand of fondness that Patty can’t quite muster up. Even when Gritty’s hovering around G’s stall as he’s lacing up, placing its hands affectionately on the crown of his head, or in a shoving match with Voracek which causes the locker room to fill with the sound of rumbly laughter and plumes of orange fur rain down on everyone with the force of their frenzied movement. 

Pats can’t feel anything other than weirded out, especially when Gritty leaves those little—little, fucking, _things_ behind for them all. 

Knobbly, twisted twigs and slivers of crumply, highlighter-orange crepe paper are arranged in a ring around Patty’s stall one morning, and he just stands there in front of it awkwardly, arms frozen at his sides as TK slaps him on the back and huffs out one of those choke-y, lispy laughs he has, the ones that make him sound like a pug with a blocked nose. 

“Hey, looks like you got an admirer, man,” he says happily while slamming shit around in his own, litter-free, stall.

“Y’know, you should prob’ly start leaving’ Grits your garbage,” he says, nonchalant, as if that sentence doesn’t knock the air out of Patty’s chest like an elbow-check to the throat. He thinks he’s actually been like, seriously fucking winded for a second, turning slowly to face TK and fix him with a look of abject horror.

“It made me this sick-ass little mini helmet? like, a statue-thing from an empty can of Monster I left here last week, y’know? Hold on—” He’s still rummaging around, tangly dark hair swinging forward to obscure his brow as his hands scrabble around in his duffle bag. “Little fuckin’ box an’everythin’here, look—”the pace of his speech picks up at the end, the way it always does when he’s excited about something.

Sure enough, in his hands is a small plastic box with a crudely crushed and cut aluminium can inside that actually does resemble a helmet. There’s even a little loop of string across the bottom to mimic the nylon adjustment strap, and it looks like it’s glued to a slightly fuzzy orange clump of—something, lining the base of the box. 

Patty doesn’t want to know what exactly that is.

“ _So_ fuckin’ cool, right?” TK says, dragging down a zip on the side of his duffel obnoxiously loudly before carefully placing the thing into its own compartment, and—that’s new. That whole ‘being careful’ thing. 

Something in Patty’s brain flickers to life momentarily to file away the split-second image of TK’s hands flush against each other, fingers entangled as he slides the box gently, slowly, into the bag. Tongue resting just below his front teeth in the way that it always is, hair still shower-damp and falling all over his eyes as usual, one strand clinging to the small section slick with spit on the inside of his bottom lip. That one spot glints briefly under the fluorescent lights of the locker room as TK moves. It’s about the size of a dime. About the width of the pad of Patty’s thumb. 

He doesn’t know why his brain catalogues that moment. For—for future reference, maybe. 

He’s very used to the TK who accidentally breaks shit in Patty’s apartment because he’s crappy at gauging his own strength off the ice, the TK who once threw a remote control across the room at him so hard that Patty’s nose had bled for a half hour. He’s not used to, like, a soft-handed TK. He wonders, briefly, what else TK deems worthy of being careful, or gentle, or slow with.

* * *

It certainly isn’t the fucking puck, Pats thinks, as he skates to the side of the rink halfway through practice, abdomen smarting despite the protection of his under-armour. 

“So-orry, my bad!” TK bellows from just left of center, sounding embarrassingly Ontarian even above the echoey rhythm of whoever’s music is on shuffle over the speakers. 

Patty has a feeling that the Spotify algorithm is getting worse, because he’s heard the same Daft Punk remix three times now. 

“Hey Pats, seriously!” TK calls again as he tries to shoot a weak shot through Hart’s nonexistent five hole, clearly far more concentrated on being a little bastard than actually playing hockey. “I thought you were gonna tip it!” He throws his shoulders up in a deliberately boyish, well it’s not my fault kind of gesture, padded shoulders all crowded up by his ears to make him look even shorter than he already is.

Pats is going to strangle him. He’s going to drop the gloves right now and pummel his ass into next week.

“Oh, with _what_ , Teeks? My _ab_ domen?”

Hart covers TK’s miserable attempt at a shot and slides it to the side of the rink, where it clunks thickly against a growing pile of stopped pucks. TK lets out an anguished and deeply frustrated groan that trails off into something resembling a primal shout as he begins to skate straight to the other end of the rink.

“Shut up about your abs already! _I’m Patty_ ,” he begins, launching into his well-worn, and quite frankly insulting, imitation of Pats. “I have a _deep voice_ and a _six pack_ , look at me!” He crosses his arms, still kicking out his skates petulantly as he circles the rink. “Big whoop, Sasquatch! We _all_ have abs!” 

TK isn’t the most skilled skater, and most of the time if Pats squints too hard at him during games he notices that he’s lopsided, listing to the right in an attempt to control or shoot the puck. There’s nothing wrong with it, because his stats put most of them to shame, but it’s different from the way he skates during relaxed practices. The frenzied edge is lost, replaced by something a lot smoother. He glides sort of gracefully, works with the ice rather than furiously hacking at it with the blades of his skates in order to gain a speed advantage.

TK unbuckles his helmet, shakes his hair out like a wild dog. Patty privately thinks that he’s having some sort of boredom-induced tantrum. He vaguely recalls something like this happening during the first practice of last season, too.

Voracek makes a borderline offensive joke about G losing his edge because of his newfound dad bod and TK is immediately distracted, turning around to face them in one fluid movement that showers a halo of crystalline ice chips around his skates. His face is crinkled up with laughter as he leans down with his stick across his knees and skates a few feet forward, probably propelled along by the force of sheer mischief alone. 

Patty’s still trying to figure out why TK jumped immediately to the topic of his six pack when he sees something orange and suspiciously soft moving around in the corner of his eye. 

He spins around sharply, with none of TK’s grace, and almost lands flat on his fucking ass before a hand—a something—reaches out to steady him by grabbing a fistful of his jersey. Patty clears his throat awkwardly as his heart jackrabbits against his ribs. Gritty’s standing right beside him, and Patty’s elbow is kind of locked in between his own chest and the weight of Gritty’s forearm. They’re almost intertwined. 

Pats can actually feel warmth radiating from the paw clasped above his chest, blazing across his skin in the spot where his under-armour and shoulder-pad had slipped apart a little during his stumble. Under all that fur, Gritty sort of has the paw of a possum—Pats can feel individual fleshy fingers twitching, winces at the scrape of a rough nail across his collarbone even through all that material. He can also see its irises circling lazily across the ice, and when he twists his neck a little to look over his shoulder, he can gather that one eye is following Giroux and the other is zoned in on TK. 

For a second he feels stuck there, staring into Gritty’s slightly bloodshot eyes, peering down at the two— _three_ , Jesus- _Goddamn_ -Christ—rows of tiny, jagged bottom teeth inside of its parted mouth, the kind of teeth Patty’s only seen in those weird pictures of wild geese that people post online. He can feel warm puffs of breath across his chin, is almost sure that he can hear a soft cooing noise low in Gritty’s throat. 

He accidentally lets out a stifled shout when he sees something filmy and brown slide across Gritty’s eyeballs and very suddenly realises that it blinks fucking _sideways_ , like a reptile. 

Gritty’s paw—hand? Patty makes an impulsive internal decision to call it a hand from now on—Gritty’s hand jerks upwards and fluffy fingers free themselves from Patty’s jersey, its knuckles almost knocking him on the chin in the process and leaving a trail of fur in their wake. Pats blows a sharp stream of air out of his mouth in an attempt to get rid of some of it. He vaguely smells something like wet dog in the air, can feel the uncomfortable itch of fur across the tip of his tongue.

“Uh.. uh,” Pats blinks. “So, I—” he’s floundering, so he just mumbles, “uh, thanks.” 

Gritty suddenly shakes its head—a brief movement that ends up leaving even more fur in Patty’s personal space—and moves fluidly toward where Giroux is motioning for it. Patty doesn’t think it has skates on, doesn’t feel brave enough to cast his gaze down and look in case whatever he sees down there like, gives him an actual fucking heart attack or something. He skates forward aimlessly, ducking his head a little to work a knuckle into the corner of his left eye. There’s a migraine blooming somewhere near his temple, and his head feels hot and urgent with the threat of it. 

“Sh _it_ , Pats,” TK’s voice, thick with humour, zips past his ear before Patrick can register that he’s even there. He looks up. “Didn’t hurt ya’ _that_ bad, did I?” 

He’s chewing on one of his helmet straps, and Patty catches the velvety flick of his tongue across nylon before landing on the concerned steeple of his brow. TK’s eyes stare up at him, warm and dark and inviting, despite being just a little weirded out around the edges. He pushes the strap between his teeth with the flat of his tongue, frown deepening into something a little closer to concern, cheeks a little flushed from all the cold. “Nolan?” 

Patty squeezes his eyes shut so hard that silver sparks crackle and bloom across the tarry insides of his eyelids. He feels like, fucking feverish about it.

“Fuck, man. It’s freaking me out is all.”

“Wha—huh?” TK says, response garbled by his helmet strap. 

Patty wishes that he’d stop doing things with his mouth for like, _two_ seconds, even. He can hear the rough drag of blades across the ice, can tell that TK is spinning himself around in circles trying to find out what’s bothering him. They’re still drifting across the rink, side by side now. Patty with his eyes shut, wrestling his under-armour into submission with one hand; TK lurching forwards and backwards, side to side, tendrils of sweaty hair hitting his cheeks as he turns his head left to right. 

“Like—” he pauses, and there’s a lapse of silence before Pats feels TK’s fingers dance along the span of his bicep in question. TK’s voice rises again, the uptick of a question at the end. “Like, Gritty?” 

Patty stops abruptly. 

“Yeah. It—I fell, a little, and it steadied me, and it—I dunno—” he stares down at TK’s gloveless hand, at the chapped skin along his knuckles, his gross, bitten down nails and the smattering of freckles just below his wrist. It suddenly occurs to Patty that the sun has darkened TK’s skin significantly. It suits him. 

“It—“ he heaves a sigh. “It blinks like a reptile and—and’has’three rows’a’teeth.” 

Pats says that last part in a rush, words tumbling out over one another messily. 

TK will get what he means. He knows him like that. 

TK nods soberly in response, cutting his eyes across to where G is scritching at the back of Gritty’s head as he talks insistently to Lindblom across a fuzzy orange mane. Its head is bowed obediently, neck bent just so to accommodate Giroux’s petting. Patty wonders if it feels nice.

“Look, I know, man. Gritty’s—“ TK cuts himself off, sighing noisily as his hand darts up to close around Patty’s, pulling it from his shoulder and down by his side. 

Pats feels the warmth of TK’s hand insistently, red-hot and sparking at his fingertips before it slides away. Their thumbs tangle, slotting together neatly for half a second before Patty flips his hand around on instinct, impulsively shaking the softness of TK’s palm away from his. He feels like his ears are going red, matching the twin splotches up by his cheekbones.

“Grits is Grits,” TK says definitively.

He makes some sort of awkward, abortive move forward, before skating to the side and bumping their shoulders together instead as he heads towards center ice. 

“S’alright, man, don’t get too crabby abo-out it!” he calls out, and Pats catches the gleam of a grin as he looks back over his shoulder momentarily.

“I think it’s just offended you didn’t leave any spare garbage for its crafts!”

Patty blinks at nothing in particular. He wishes he didn’t have to keep hearing these kinds of things come out of TK’s mouth.

* * *

Other than his collision with Gritty and the momentary brush with heart failure that it had induced, practice is pretty standard for Pats. He notices that TK keeps peering over to dart glances between him and Gritty in the brief periods of loaf time he gets between drills, and Patty kind of appreciates it, even though it’s entirely unnecessary. 

The team tumbles into the locker room, all achy muscles and murmurs about the offseason hammering them out of shape. Patty sorely regrets dropping his workout down to five days a week for the summer, and makes a mental note to head to the gym tomorrow. 

Before everyone leaves, he digs around in the front pocket of his bag. His fingers find the foil casing of the sludgy protein flapjack that Giroux had tossed at him this morning, after asking if he’d eaten breakfast in the most intimidating manner a heavily accented French-Canadian could. 

Pats thinks that those things taste like glue, but he didn’t really have a frame of reference for it until TK had offhandedly confirmed: “yeah—total glue,” with a somber nod of his head. 

He’d shrugged, as if it were the most normal thing in the world to then say: “brings me right back to elementary, y’know?”

Patty did not. 

He didn’t really think he could handle a glue-eating discussion at eight in the morning though, so he’d just resigned to remembering that particular TK factoid and pulling it out during their next argument instead.

He turns the foil over in his hands, staring at the squiggly blue holographic letters, the sticky fragments of bar clinging to the inside of the wrapper. 

Gritty probably doesn’t have a problem with eating glue. 

Patty smooths it out, mushing it flat between the palms of his hands and tucking it into the corner of his stall before following TK and his slumped shoulders out into the parking lot. He lets the hot Philly air envelope him and wonders, vaguely, when exactly his life had gotten this bizarre.

* * *

TK can never be bothered to walk up the extra two flights of stairs it takes to get to his own apartment, which Pats thinks is kind of ironic considering the fact that he’s a professional athlete. They’re barely through the front door before TK starts throwing his shit around and making a beeline for the sliding glass doors to Patty’s balcony, head jammed in the arm-hole of his t-shirt as he attempts to take it off and somehow fails spectacularly. 

“We got any beer?” He asks, voice muffled by fabric. 

Patty balks.

“ _We_?” he calls, slightly offended. “This is _my_ apartment in case you forgot, ya moochy f _uck_.”

TK’s already thrown the doors open. He’s then absorbed in the process of stretching his legs out on one of the wicker deck chairs that Patty had thrown some old beach towels over, their colourful zigzag patterns faded from the heat of countless summers. 

“Oh, _so-orry_ , did you want me to Venmo you the f _our_ dollars it cost for a fuckin’ Bud Light?” 

His voice is somehow already sun-sleepy even though he’s been out there for less than five minutes. Patty doesn’t dignify that with a response, silently pulling twin beers out of the cooler and cracking them open on the edge of his countertop. 

Over the year that Pats had lived here, he’d accumulated several nicks and scrapes across the smooth swirls of blond marble—all from beer bottles, all from him and TK. Pats wonders how much the landlord is going to charge him for this when he moves out. He stares down at the counter for a second, slotting a thumbnail into one particularly huge chip that he doesn’t remember making. They should—he should buy a bottle opener. 

TK is taking up as much room as is humanly possible on the deck chair outside—legs sprawled haphazardly, head lolling back, arms behind his head. 

It’s somehow still blisteringly hot in Philly, even though they’re well into September now. Patty feels sweat prickle at the back of his neck, shakes the hand clutching both beer bottles by the neck and they bounce off one another. 

During his first team dinner as a rookie, a partially tipsy Giroux had initiated a table-wide cheers by asking them to “ _make their glasses sing_ ”, and Pats had never forgotten it. He remembers the bewildered smile TK had thrown his way over their drinks, eyes wide and warm, crinkled at the edges. 

Now though, the high, clear rattle causes TK to peer over at Pats and heave a blustery, long-suffering sigh. 

“Can y’bring it over to the’table?” He asks, slurred and low. His voice is even more sun-laden than Patty had thought was possible, exhaustion stretching out the syllables. 

The table TK is referring to isn’t even really a table, just a wooden Ikea stool littered with bleachy condensation rings. It’s on the other side of the deck chair, which is propped up diagonally across the balcony because it was too long to fit any other way. Pats sighs noisily in retaliation, disturbing the lanks of loose hair around his face. 

“What,” he says flatly, “so I’m your fuckin’ waiter now?” 

TK nods slowly, eyes closed. “Always.”

“Always takin’ up so much fuckin’ _room_ , more’like,” Pats mumbles to no one in particular as he hoists a leg across the extended deck chair, reaching out an arm so he can set down one of the bottles. 

Just to be an annoying shit, Patty shoves his hand in TK’s face, trying to push at his head while he’s climbing over. Being an annoying shit in response, TK jerks his head to the side right as Patty pushes forward. It results in an awkward tussle and a sharp intake of breath, right when Pats realises that his thumb is in TK’s mouth, fingers sort of half-holding his jaw. Patty’s index finger is brushing the downy hair of TK’s eyebrow. 

They both freeze momentarily, and Patty wants the ground to swallow him whole. There’s a vague flicker of interest somewhere below his abdomen towards the end of the thought, and Pats tries frantically to forget about that particular combination of words. 

The pad of his thumb is resting along the jagged bottom row of TK’s teeth, and Pats can just barely feel the warm, damp softness on the inside of his lower lip, where the joint of his thumb is dragging it down. 

TK is breathing heavily through his mouth now, shallow panting that pushes tides of hot air across Patty’s entire hand. He stares at the pool of sweat shining in the hollow of TK’s collarbone, can’t bring himself to meet his eye. 

His thumb is like, barely even in there, but it’s in far enough that Patty can feel it when TK swipes his tongue across the very tip. Patty’s eyes snap up of their own accord and, shit. 

Shit, _fuck_ , TK is looking right at him, eyelids low, pupils blown wide and cavernous. 

Probably because Patty’s hovering over him, blocking the sun, he thinks. His thoughts are slow and fuzzy, sliding across the back of his brain a couple seconds too late. His head feels like a washing-machine on spin-cycle, bag skates levels of dizzy. 

He should move. He should definitely move. 

Patty’s trying to come up with a non-awkward way to break eye contact and take his hand out of his best friend’s like, fucking mouth, when TK’s tongue darts out to rest along the underside of Patty’s thumb. The movement is swift and sudden, spurred along by TK thrusting his head forward a little so that his mouth covers Patty’s thumb down to the second joint. 

A breath Patty didn’t realise he was holding rockets out of his lungs, the force of it propelling him forward a little. His fingers stutter and slide across the curve of TK’s stubbly jaw as the beer bottles let out a dull clink somewhere below his left ear.

Pats feels like he’s about to explode, electric heat blooming fast and hot and heavy all over his body. 

TK’s mouth is wet and velvety, and they’re still staring at each other, and TK has this look on his face that Patty would _absolutely_ give him shit for if they were anywhere else. Right now though, it’s scarily intense, staring straight into Patty’s like, fucking soul or something, mouth slack and pliant under his thumb. Jesus Ch _rist_. 

It elicits a breathy sound from the recesses of Patty’s chest that he immediately cringes at. In response, TK rolls his tongue in several slithery movements and hollows out his cheeks. 

The soft inside of his mouth sliding along Patty’s thumb sends a direct message straight to his dick. 

Bubbly froth slides across the fingers of Patty’s other hand and leaves hot, sticky trails in its wake before Pats even realises that he’s tilting the beers. He can’t even bring himself to stop it from where he’s now locked in place, straddling the deck chair. Sweaty, skin burning all over: a sensory overload in both his hands, a blush itching and prickling along his neck, chest and cheeks with how fast it’s rising, the solid weight of TK’s calf along the inside of his thigh. 

He’s about to spring a fucking boner. 

TK pulls his mouth away from Patty’s hand with an obscene noise and turns his head to the left, the side of his face squashed against the deckchair. They’re really, uncomfortably close. He scans Patty with one squinty eye, pushed into a single crescent moon with the force of his smile. 

“Well that was the worst popsicle I’ve ever had,” he says, voice rough-edged and laughing. 

Patty chokes on nothing, finally settling the beers and quickly extracting himself from their tangle of limbs and skin and the feathery, fluttery heat still curdling in his stomach. He grunts lowly, struggling to form words. He thinks TK is laughing at him, a little. 

“D _umbfu_ ck,” he manages eventually, “drink your fuckin’ beer.”

“Thanks for spillin’ half of it!” TK says without any heat as Patty legs it back into the kitchen.

He stands there against his shitty-looking counter for a couple minutes, letting the marble press a sharp dent into his lower back. He mashes the heels of his hands into his eye sockets, because his thumb is still wet and the fingers of his other hand are sticky with settled beer. _God_. The insides of his eyelids are bleary with sun, still adjusting to the shade of the indoors, and greeny-blue blobs dance across a background of vibrant, coppery orange.

* * *

Later, TK kicks past the tangled mess of clothes that he discarded earlier without picking any of it up. This is his usual protocol. Patty always starts out gingerly sidestepping it for a couple of hours, and maybe he’ll like, throw a couple pointed glances across at TK whenever they’re both in clear view of it. Eventually though, Pats just ends up toeing it all into the laundry basket as he’s leaving to wash his own shit. TK sheds and discards his expensive athleisure gear with all the grace of like, a huge lizard shedding its skin. 

Patty thinks about the bearded dragon his sister owned briefly when he was in middle school, remembers the pearly patches of coarse skin he’d find across the breakfast bar, the soles of his socks, wedged flat along the spine of his biology textbook. TK is kind of like that. Turning up in the mundane parts of Patty’s life more often than anyone else. Bearded dragon skin is the only consistent memory Pats has of middle school, so he thinks it’s a fitting analogy. He guesses that t-shirts with Rorschach test sweat marks and swim shorts with ratty, inside-out netting are the constant memory he’ll have of these years. He’s alright with that. 

TK’s voice rings out from Patty’s barren guest bedroom, distorted and echoey. The only evidence of life in there is the wonky set of drawers pushed into the corner of the room, holding every item of clothing that TK discards at Patty’s place hostage. They’re crumpled and shoved at the back of the narrowest drawer, the one that doesn’t open all the way. 

Patty thought it’d deter him from leaving all his shit here, but it had essentially just created a cycle of Pats washing TK’s clothes and spitefully cramming them into his least favourite piece of furniture, only to have TK wedge his arm in there to fish them out a couple days later and take it as enough invitation to stay over. 

“Sanny’s still doing his weird Star Trek shit,” Patty hears from where he’s lying with his feet kicked up on his deckchair, torso housed in the shade of the living room so he can scroll through Instagram without the glare of the sun. 

He lets his head roll to the side. TK’s referring to Sanheim’s Lego hobby, which involves buying wildly expensive collector’s item building sets and taking forever to build them. Right now he’s in the middle of the Millennium Falcon, and according to TK, every inch of their apartment has become a warzone of tiny, sharp blocks of plastic. 

“Star Wars!” He bellows. 

There’s a ruckus to Patty’s right, and he hears the distinct sound of a body colliding with his coffee table. 

“Same shit,” TK says breezily, emerging in a comically wrinkled pair of basketball shorts. Patty sighs, lets the hand holding his phone fall limp against his chest.

“So you’re gonna stay here and eat all my bagels in the morning,” he says wearily, trying to remember if the fridge has enough food for two professional athletes. It definitely doesn’t. 

“Well, since you offered so nicely,” TK says, hunching his shoulders again and grinning like the smarmy bastard he is. 

“You’re paying for takeout tonight.”

“Don’t I do that anyways?”

Patty’s phone buzzes on his chest, screen lit up to show that the GrittyNHL account liked one of his pictures. He cranes his neck to squint at the thumbnail in the corner of the notification. It’s that old one of him and TK at G’s wedding. He can’t remember why they’d taken that, only that TK had procured his phone at some point during the service and shoved it into Raffl’s hand as everyone was walking out. _Smile pretty_ , he’d mumbled teasingly into Patty’s shoulder, _this is goin’ to my mom_. 

Blurry variants of that photo take up two rows in Pats’ camera roll, both a testament to how unphotogenic they are and Raffl’s inability to see any screen with the brightness at less than a hundred percent. In one of them, TK’s glasses are slipping down his nose a little, face angled towards Patty, eyes staring up at him in a sort of jokey frown. Pats couldn’t really read through the sarcasm at the time, but looking back, he thinks he’d call the expression fond. 

He’d drunkenly AirDropped the whole series to TK in the Uber on the way home, elbowing him in the ribs and leaning down to mumble something like _mom duty, dude_ into his ear. Giroux had somehow made sure that all his guests were piss drunk by the time the reception had dwindled to an end, so they’d been slumped all over each other in the back of the car. 

TK was half-asleep, arm slung across Patty’s shoulders to palm at the back of his neck the whole ride home, tangling Pats’ hair up and humming nonsense into his ear. Pats remembers catching the driver’s eye in the rear-view mirror, the raised eyebrows and knowing smile, remembers shifting uncomfortably in response. He doesn’t remember shoving TK away though, so he supposes that he didn’t. He doesn’t remember refusing to hook an arm around TK’s waist and help him out of the car and into Patty’s apartment and onto the couch. He supposes he’d done that, too. 

In any case, TK had barged into Patty’s bedroom the next morning wearing the same suit, slapped him on the ass as he’d stumbled past and proceeded to hog Patty’s en-suite shower for forty-five minutes.

Patty wonders if TK’s mom ever got that photo, if she got all of them including the blurry ones. He wonders what she said about it, about them together, wonders briefly if TK sends photos of all his teammates back home to his family. 

The GrittyNHL account likes three more of his photos in quick succession, the buzzes pin-balling across Patty’s chest as he screws his eyes shut hard enough to sting. 

“Shut _up_.”

* * *

Patty’s air con is broken, and it’s ninety seven degrees out. By the time they realise this, they’re already sprawled across the kitchen floor beneath the fridge, its doors flung open wide and welcoming to let cool air brush against Patty’s knees, skim over TK’s feet where they’re resting inside. The weak fluorescent light the fridge casts is dulled by insistent sunlight filtering through Patty’s kitchen window, also open in the hopes of tempting in a nonexistent breeze. Nothing is working. TK’s toes are dangerously close to the shelf where Patty keeps his vegetables. 

Pats peels his back away from the tile beneath him, cringes at the dewy imprint of sweat left behind.

“We can’t like, go to your place?” 

Even speaking feels arduous. Patty can feel sweat collecting between his shoulder blades, across his upper lip. He lets his head roll backwards, feels his hair stick to his shoulder blades as he does it, a wave of heat rippling across his skin in response.

“Sanny’sthere,” TK mumbles, eyes closed. He tries to pour some lukewarm water into his mouth, misses by a mile. His neck shines, rivulets of water reflective in the light of the sun.

“ _And_?”

Patty stares intensely at a single, sad little ice cube running down the hills and valleys of TK’s chest. It stops at the waistband of his swim shorts, floating forwards and backwards in a pool of sweat at the vee of his hips. Patty chances a glance up, sees that TK’s eyes are still closed. Patty refocuses his gaze on the ice cube, melting by the minute. TK shifts his hips up as he reaches down to brush it away, scrabbling at his lower abdomen, fingers diving just below his waistband. And then Patty’s brain kicks into overdrive, because it kind of looks like he’s about to—

“You don’t have like, an electric fan or something?” TK says flatly, stilling and snapping his eyes open, seemingly bored with this line of conversation already. 

Patty shifts where he’s sitting, draws his knees up a little closer to his chest. “I have air con.”

TK snorts. “Clearly _not_ when you need it the most.” 

“Why would I own a fan if I have air con,” Patty asks, deadpan.

“For emergencies.”

“Ninety degree weather isn’t an emergency.”

“Ninety _seven_ is an emergency. It’s a threat to my sanity.”

“Fuck off,” Pats says, punctuating this with a swift punch to TK’s shoulder. “Don’t see why we can’t just go to your place.”

TK shrugs, knuckles grazing the place Patty had laid one on him. “You’re here,” he says, mumbly and quiet, as if that offers any kind of explanation as to why they’re currently melting into the kitchen floor. 

Patty doesn’t really know what to say to that.

* * *

Later, when the sun has set, they end up lying on the couch together with the blinds drawn and the TV blaring loudly in the background. It’s some dumb first person shooter TK had picked out of a bargain bin somewhere in Ontario: split screen with laggy graphics and odd, blocky looking soldiers punctuated by cherry splashes of pixelated blood. 

He’s still cheap like that. Pats doesn’t mind. 

A grunt bursts out of the speaker to their left, and Patty’s controller vibrates spasmodically in his hand. He makes an indignant, choked-off sound. 

Odd, warbly looking text covers Patty’s side of the screen:

“ **[nopats]** **ANNIHILATED BY** **[trako]** ”

it announces sombrely, the low chime of a church bell ringing out as it disappears and Patty’s screen fades to black. TK’s laughing as his character gives a thumbs up from a watchtower Pats hadn’t even noticed was there. 

“S _nip_ ed you, dude! An _nihilated_ your ass!” TK shouts, genuine delight in his voice as he punches at Patty’s shoulder.

“Stop talkin’bout my ass,” Patty grumbles, shoving himself into the side of the couch in an effort to get away. It’s still humid in his apartment, and the leather sticks to his forearm.

“It’s my favourite line’a conversation,” TK says, still laughing obnoxiously into Patty’s ear while pummelling at his side.

Pats darts a hand out to grab his wrist, ends up knocking them against each other to clutch both in his grip. 

TK’s laughter slowly fades away. They’re just sort of looking at each other now, blinking into the staticky buzz of cheesy nostalgia synth from the video game. 

Patty realises that they’re really, really close: he’s caged in by couch cushions with TK’s knee digging into his hip, their calves touching where one foot each is still planted on the floor. He’s bizarrely reminded of being held in Gritty’s grip, the memory of its warmth a fuzzy mimicry of this kind of proximity. This is—Patty knows that this is vastly different.

TK’s got that intense look in his eye that makes Pats feel all tight and agitated in his stomach. He shifts in his seat, catches the way TK follows the movement, swallows a little in response. Jesus. Je _sus_. 

“Uh,” he says, mouth falling open a little. TK’s eyes zone in, and Patty thinks he’s about to like, fucking die or something. His chest feels weird, a feeling behind his rib cage that sinks and rushes at the same time. He wonders if it’s like, heart cancer or some shit. 

TK’s wrists are still in Patty’s grip, but he feels the sinewy muscles shift under his fingertips as TK draws both hands closer, still cupped in that loose, butterfly shape. His fingers twitch minutely, and Patty’s just staring at TK’s callused, slack hands as they inch closer, pink-tinged palms and blunt, bitten down nails. He’s still holding onto his wrists for some reason, feeling a steady pulse at the paper-thin skin there. 

TK’s hands cup Patty’s chin, and he feels fingertips skitter across his cheekbones as if they’re scared to settle, feels a blush flare up under his skin in response. TK is still looking at him, right into his eyes, making it impossible to look anywhere else. He’s leaning forward, dragging Patty’s chin towards him. Patty’s no expert, but he thinks that like, his chest is going to give out. 

Definitely heart cancer. Some sort of tumour. A rare disease that’s probably going to like, kill him in his sleep tonight or something. 

TK breathes wetly into his mouth, and Pats reflexively does the same. Patty’s gaze darts rapidly around TK’s face, looking for some sort of like, fucking clue as to what’s happening right now. He probably looks really stupid, he thinks, in the back of his head.

Something in TK’s features crumple, just the little notch of a frown that Patty wouldn’t have noticed if they weren’t eye to eye. TK takes a deep breath, closes his eyes, knocks their foreheads together. 

It’s gentle, slow. 

Patty lets go of TK’s wrists, hand sliding down across his forearms. 

“Uhh,” he blurts again, faltering hugely when TK blinks his eyes open. Fuck. “I, _uh_ —”

“Y’hungry, bud?” TK hauls himself off the couch in one swift movement, and Patty’s hand is flung backwards into his own lap. TK’s like, halfway across the room now, messing around with the phone charger at the wall of the kitchen island. TK waggles his phone in Patty’s direction, and he watches it balance precariously between thumb and forefinger. “Think they got some half-price deal on Wednesdays at the sushi place.”

Pats grunts in affirmation. “Uh, yeah.”

His character had flickered back onto the screen at some point in a pool of his own over-saturated pixel blood, 2-bit fingertips twitching over the gory, video-game-sized hole at his chest. The screen freezes as the option for a rematch floats above the avatar. Patty just thumbs at the joystick on his controller uselessly in response.

* * *

“Holy _shit_ , man!” TK says loudly, right by his fucking ear. He’s pointing in the direction of their stalls. “Gritty gift.” There’s something downright reverent in his voice. 

Patty reflexively jerks his head away. It’s too fucking early for this. 

Sure enough, there’s something glinting in the corner of his stall: a little box wedged along the wooden planks of his seat. Pats is just glad it isn’t more sticks or dirt, or like, orange crud. 

TK rushes over, swinging all his shit around and knocking a bundle of spare hockey sticks into the wall. They make an awkward, splintery sound, and Patty cringes. 

“Oh _bud_ ,” TK murmurs breathily. “This is like—” he fumbles with the strap of his duffel bag, letting it clatter to the floor. “This is legit.”

There’s a silvery jersey about the size of his palm lying flat in the box, 19 carefully stitched on it using some sort of wispy orange felt. Patty recognises the holographic wrapper from his protein bar, and feels a weird twinge in his chest. He feels vaguely nauseous, but also, like, kind of charmed, somehow. 

“Oh,” he says eloquently. 

TK hands him the box with as much concentration as any human being is capable of at six in the morning. He feels the weight of it in his hand, watches the jersey reflect and refract the locker room ceiling lights across the inside of the box. It’s kind of—Patty thinks it’s kind of beautiful. TK’s watching him turn it left and right with a weird look on his face, half doofy smile, half something else. Pats presses the box back into TK’s hand. It’s sweaty, but like, in a warm, familiar way.

“Keep it in that—” he swallows as TK looks up at him, steadies himself. “That pocket y’got.” Pats tips his head towards the duffel bag between them.

TK peers down to look. “What, my Gritty pouch?”

Pats screws his eyes shut. “Never say those words again.”

* * *

Practice is terrible. They just can’t nail the PPK, no matter how many weird scenarios they go through, no matter how many line-up changes and inventive plays are frantically scribbled and crossed out and scribbled again. Nothing is gelling, and everyone is frustrated. TK keeps spinning around on his heels to break away from the group when they’re discussing things, the huge, bulky fingers of his gloves trying to itch up near his temples past the confines of his helmet. Pats can tell that he’s angry, can see it simmering and boiling in his movements. 

This practice makes it feel like they’re slumping again, like they’re in the doomed days of April when everyone was worn thin and bone-tired and so far off their game that they fucked up the one opportunity they’d worked so hard to even get. 

“TK!” Giroux thunders over the shitty, pounding beat of some stupid top forty EDM mix. “Do that one more time and you’re _done_!” 

G’s voice always gets faster and sharper when he’s snappish, and Patty cringes on TK’s behalf. Knowing the kind of mood TK’s in, and knowing the way G deals with any kind of deliberate ignorance of the captaincy, Pats guesses that this is like, a recipe for disaster.

TK skates harder and almost collides with the empty net at the end of the ice, slamming his stick down onto the metal bar and letting the pieces ricochet around him as he storms towards the locker rooms. 

Patty like, distantly hears G call his name as he instinctively follows TK. “ _Patrick_! Don’t even think about leaving this rink right n—” is all he gets before it devolves into vitriolic French swearing. 

He looks over his shoulder to see Hartman shoot him a look. Eyebrows raised, the gaps in his bottom row of teeth on display as his mouth turns down at the edges. He tips two fingers from his helmet towards the rafters of the stadium. _Good luck, man,_ the look says. _You’re gonna fuckin’ need it._

Patty awkwardly stumbles down the hall in his skates. He doesn’t want to call out for TK, but he’s like, kind of desperate to find his stupid ass. “Bud?” He tries weakly. 

Something makes a skittering noise behind him and the sound bounces across the brick walls of the hallway and travels right up Patty’s fucking spine.

“Uh—” he stops in his tracks. “Y’there, dude?” 

There’s one square of waxy, yellow light coming from the locker room, while the rest of the hallway is grainy with darkness. It’s right around then that Patty has the weird, deja-vu realisation that something has been hovering right behind him the entire time. 

He’s gonna like, shit his pants.

In actuality, he sneezes. Loudly, and with significantly more force than he was expecting. He tips forward, losing balance on his skates before something hauls him backwards by the scruff of his jersey. He already knows what’s there, at this point. Patty sends a vaguely pissy threat to whoever is controlling the universe right now, and making his life feel like the failed punch-line of a floundering stand up comedian. 

He struggles in vain until he’s hauled around to face Gritty. Being suspended in the air by a seven foot tall, traffic-cone orange, sentient entity so forcefully that his skates just barely brush the cheap stadium carpet isn’t really how he pictured his Thursday morning going when he woke up. 

Gritty’s nails dig into the meat of his shoulders, and Patty feels like his internal organs are actively collapsing. Its breath smells vaguely like popcorn, and there’s maybe a hint of corn dog in the back there somewhere. 

“Gritty—can y’like..” Patty cringes around the words. “Can you let me go, bud?”

Gritty blinks sideways. 

Pats lets out a blustery sigh and tries not to make eye contact with all its teeth. 

“Thanks for helpin’ me out, Grits. Real appreciated. Honestly.” He’s squirming, a little, twisting in Gritty’s surprisingly iron-like grip. “Can you just—” he grunts awkwardly, “ _please_ —”

Gritty lifts him a little higher. 

Pats feels something burning hot and insistent in the hollow of his chest, and he thrashes angrily in Gritty’s grip.

“You know wh _at_?” He hisses, trying to decide which eye to look into as they both slowly drift in opposite directions. “You’re fucking _weird_! And you c _reep_ me _out_!” 

Gritty tilts its head to the side.

Patty knocks his head back to lose his helmet, sweaty hair flopping forwards and hitting him square in the face. He feels a million spikes of indignation flare up in his chest. 

“And I just don’t think it’s like, _right_ , that you’re around all the time, bud! It’s not _chill_! The vibes aren’t _great_!” His helmet clatters as it hits the ground, rolling aimlessly on its side. Pats leans into the catharsis of blurting out what he actually thinks. “I like, can’t fuckin’ _think_ when you’re around, dude!”

Gritty’s fingers tighten on Pats’ shoulders and he feels something shift slightly, crunching underneath the skin. He kind of chokes. 

“I mean, like—” his legs flail, a little. “Like no hate on _you_ , bud, but it’s dist _ract_ ing!” 

Both of its eyes refocus on Patty’s face, and he feels his throat seize up. 

This is it, he thinks. This is how he dies. By the fuzzy orange hand of his fucking mascot. 

“Patty?” He hears distantly, and he’d know that voice anywhere. “ _Gritty_?”

Pats crumples to stand on unsteady feet as Gritty plops him down and scampers over to TK, enveloping him in a hug that nearly bowls him over with the sheer force of it. TK laughs his gurgly surprise-laugh, the pleased one that shakes out of him whenever Patty least expects it.

“Whatcha doin’ here, bud?” TK asks, frowning while poking his head out from underneath a violently orange arm. Gritty’s fur rolls in waves around TK’s face, and he sort of looks like a kid sticking his head through one of those paintings of animals at fairgrounds with the faces cut out. Like, some kind of lion or wildcat. 

Pats swallows. 

“Lookin’ for you,” he says, shrugging sore shoulders.

TK’s face reaches the beaming crescendo of a smile, tongue poking out from beneath his front teeth. “We’re in _so_ much shit.”

* * *

‘Shit’ turns out to be bag skates. A _lot_ of fucking bag skates. 

It’s just Giroux and Gritty on the sidelines watching them, G chatting nonchalantly on the phone while Gritty has somehow curled itself along the bench and has its head in his lap. 

They’ve been skating for what feels like years, and Pats can’t manage to block out the sound of TK breathing laboriously alongside him. 

Patty almost trips when G finally waves them over. 

“Beat it,” he says, jerking his head back towards the locker rooms. Pats drags himself across the rink divide, legs prickly and hot and aching as he moves. G stills TK as he tries to shuffle past. 

“Not you,” he says. “We need to talk.” The way he says it is slow and tired. 

Pats opens his mouth, but G cuts him off before he even says anything. 

“Don’t need to wait on him Patty. Go home.”

He throws his hands up at TK, who shoots him an indignant look that Patty wishes he could’ve gotten on camera, because that shit was hilarious. He keeps walking backwards until he can’t see them anymore, until they’re just three blurred figures crouching close along the line of the bench, low murmurs fading into the dull sound of Patty’s skates scraping across the floor.

* * *

It’s late. Really late. Like, late enough for those weird infomercials to be on loop across every channel on Patty’s TV. He’s just been sitting here all day like a tool, watching random bullshit and icing his shoulders. He unlocks his phone sourly, squinting at the blue-white light of his screen, a thread of increasingly short messages stuck on ‘delivered’. He feels kind of shitty for leaving TK earlier, had sort of expected him to barge into his apartment a couple hours later and gush about whatever he and Giroux had talked about. He scrolls through their thread one more time.

[16:08] **Yo what happened with G**

[16:09] **bet u got ur ass handed to u chump**

[20:27] **I’m bored where are u**

[23:34] **Ur dumb laggy game is still here**

[23:47] **how do u find these shitty cod ripoffs**

[23:48] **we legit have like 10 of them now**

[02:35] **Cmon man**

[02:37] **i know ur sulking**

[02:52] **Doors open bud**

[04:03] **Call me u ass**

Maybe that last text was a little harsh. Still. His eyes dart to the numbers at the top of his screen. 5:08. He thumbs out of his messages aggressively and tries to boot up Instagram. His phone freezes on the sickly purple logo screen before he realises that it’s vibrating with an incoming FaceTime call from TK. The picture splashed across his screen is from G’s wedding, TK trying to neck two bottles of Corona Extra at the same time and spilling half of them across his freshly-starched shirt. He’s smiling around the bottles, eyes looking right at the camera.

Pats feels a tickle in his nose as he jabs the circular green button at the bottom of his screen. 

The weird microphone feedback sound gives way to a grainy, dark screen. Pats can vaguely make out what he thinks is like, TK’s chest area. 

“ _Patty_!” TK shouts, and even though the audio quality is God fucking awful, Pats can tell that TK’s hammered. 

“What’s up, bud?” He says at a normal volume. Only his eyes and eyebrows are visible on his little rectangle in the corner of the screen, as he peers at his phone to try and make sense of where exactly TK is.

“Oh, like, like fuckin’ _nothin_ ’, man,” TK says, blustery and faux-blasé the way he is when he’s in a drunkenly conversational mood. Patty knows this act, knows he’s about to go on some sort of tangent.

“Oh yeah?” Pats responds, and he’s definitely frowning into the camera now. 

TK fumbles with his phone and Patty catches the orange glare of a streetlight, a glimpse at the soft underside of TK’s chin and the weird stubble growing there. 

“You uh—you walkin’ home bud?” 

“ _Bud_!” TK says out of the corner of his mouth, sounding far more incredulous than he has any right to be. “Y’always call me _names_ Patty. What’s that about?”

Pats rolls his eyes. “Cause we’re buddies,” he says, monotonous as he can manage.

TK scoffs, and does something weird with his phone in his hand that skews the camera upside down. “That what we’re callin’ it?”

Pats cranes his neck in an attempt to see TK’s expression the right way up. “Huh?”

TK puts his phone in his pocket. 

Patty tries not to like, scream out of pure frustration. “TK? Te _eks_?”

All he can hear is vague mumbling over the overwhelming and irritating sound of fabric shuffling against the mic of TK’s phone. 

Patty eventually gives up calling his name, grabbing his now-melted ice pack so he can swing a cold stripe of condensation along his sore shoulder. There’s some sort of weird ultra-soak cloth being advertised on Patty’s TV, and he watches as the pretty blonde host wrings out a huge tangle of soft-looking, orange fabric into a mop bucket. The water is dark and tarry. 

It’s been like—Pats mashes his home button so he can see how long they’ve been talking for. The flashing text across the green bar says they’re almost at eight minutes. Pats is about to hang up when he sees TK’s fingers scrabble around near the camera and lift his phone back up to his face.

It’s a little too close, actually. Patty can see sweat across the bridge of his nose, can definitely see the sunburn across his forehead, his long eyelashes and droopy, drunk eyes. 

“Y’know what I’m _saying_ , Pats?” He murmurs right into the mic, half of the sentence just coming out as staticky breath noises. 

Patty rears back from his phone a little. TK must have his mouth right up to the receiver. 

“Yeah, man. Sure,” he says, holding his phone in one hand while frantically sweeping his other across the couch in search of a cushion. “Wanna crash at mine?”

TK snorts. “Uh, _ye-ah_.”

* * *

[5:16] **her;e**

[5:18] **wait wrong side**

[5:24] **here . deginitely here nowbabyyy**

Patty buzzes him in, frowning at the last message in the thread. 

TK manages to make as much noise as is humanly possible for any one person to make as he comes in, stumbling over Patty’s side table and sending the plastic bowl of keys jangling and skidding across the floor. Pats sighs and hauls TK under his arm, guiding him to the living room. 

“You’re real warm, Patty,” TK murmurs as Pats tries to manoeuvre them down the hall. “And also, like, strong. Y’re a _cha-amp_ ,” he says, slurring his words into Patty’s neck. He tries not to freeze when he feels TK’s mouth moving along the bottom of his jaw, soft touches and wet breaths. He breathes something that sounds like _thank you_. Or, like, something that ends with you. 

Pats steadies himself and heaves a lungful of air across the top of TK’s head. 

“Okay bud,” he says, pushing him onto the couch. “Go the fuck to sleep.”

TK rolls over to sit forward with his elbows on his knees and squishes his fingers into his eyes. It looks—actually kind of painful. 

Patty swats his hands away. 

“Need to throw up, man? I can getcha a bucket,” he says, in what he hopes is a soothing tone. He doesn’t think he’s ever owned a bucket in his life. 

TK makes a whiny noise at the back of his throat. “Nah, Pats,” he says, waving his hands around dismissively. “What’d we say about fuck’n— _fuck’n bud_ though?” 

His eyes are squinty and he’s making weird, contorted movements with his eyebrows. Patty swallows a laugh. 

“Tha-at.. you’re my.. buddy?” He tries, smiling sheepishly. TK definitely doesn’t remember the trip Pats took down the pocket of his cargo pants.

TK reaches a hand out to tap Patty’s cheek, cupping the side of his face and using it as leverage to lean forward and rest his head in the crook of Patty’s neck. 

“Whatever you need’a tell yourself Pats,” he murmurs.

Patty swallows audibly. His shoulders start to feel a little achy again. 

TK’s still stroking his face. They sit there for a while, Pats squatting beside the couch, bracketed in by TK’s messy, splayed legs. 

“TK,” Pats whispers. He feels TK’s eyelashes brushing against his collarbone. “Te _ek_ s.”

TK makes a weird clicking sound with his mouth, sort of like a tut. 

“Bro,” Pats says, reaching up to shake his shoulders. “It’s beddy-bye, dude. It’s night-night.”

TK laughs, and it’s more of a huff of air and a shoulder shake, but he falls back onto the couch and kicks off his dirty sneakers all the same. 

Pats grabs a water bottle from the fridge and some Advil from the cabinet in the bathroom and leaves them on the coffee table. TK’s a pain in the ass, but Pats doesn’t want him to like, die or anything. 

Before he leaves, he looks down at TK’s stupid face squashed into the side of the couch. The freckles across his nose are darker, standing out against the bright stripes of sunburn there and on his forehead. The set of his mouth is soft and there’s no divot between his eyebrows. 

Patty hesitates. 

He reaches down slowly, first resting a fingertip against the crown of TK’s head before letting the rest fall and tangle together in his hair. It’s kind of mussed up. Patty tries to tame it a little, runs his hand through it until it’s all smooth and uniform. TK murmurs something softly. Patty’s hand stills. He leans in, just a little. TK huffs.

“I said, S’nice. Feels n _ic_ e.” 

Pats blinks down at TK’s huddled form, bathed in the soft glow of the streetlights outside. It’s very quiet in his apartment. He crouches down, low, so he’s face-level with TK. He takes a deep breath. 

Patty curls his hand towards the side of TK’s head. His fingers hover there before settling into a gentle skritch, running slow circles through TK’s hair. Patty swallows. His throat is really dry.

“Oh yeah?” Pats murmurs, barely audible.

TK hums in affirmation. “Love it when you touch me.” 

Patty’s hand falters and he exhales embarrassingly deeply, sending a puff of air across TK’s forehead. TK’s eyes drift open in response, and Pats can sort of see the beginnings of a smile curling at his mouth.

“Go to _bed-bye_ , dude,” TK commands, still whispering as he rolls his head to face the couch.

Patty walks, zombie-like, to his room.

* * *

“Pats.” There’s a soft poke at his shoulder.

“Patty.” An insistent shove. 

“Patr— _hey_! Don’t tell me to fuck off, _nerd_.” 

Patty forces his eyes open to see TK’s torso backlit by streams of blindingly bright sunlight. His eyes feel like they’re covered in sandpaper.

“Wh’ fuck’n time’s it?” Pats manages, smushing his head back into his pillow. 

“I threw up in the living room.” 

Patty sighs, but it just makes his face all hot and dampens the pillow. “Just..” he trails off, eyes drifting shut momentarily. He snorts himself awake. “Jus’clean it’inthe morning,” he finishes, rapid fire. His words are all sliding into one another. “G’sleep.”

Patty hears the shuffle of TK’s feet across his floorboards. The mattress sinks momentarily at his side and he already feels significantly warmer. 

“Didn’ mean here, moochy _fuck_.”

TK laughs, and Pats feels it through the mattress. “Guest room bed’s shit. It’s always _been shit_ , man.” 

Patty cracks an eye open. “Why’re you always staying over here then, dumbass,” he says flatly, more of a statement than a question. 

“Uh, you?” TK says, and it’s more of a question than a statement. 

Pats wrenches open both of his eyes to see TK staring at him across the mountain of pillows in Patty’s bed. TK’s expression looks equal parts bewildered and amused.

“You don’t, like,” he knuckles at a lump of sleep in the corner of his eye. “You don’t remember last night?” 

“Oh and you _do_?” Pats says, indignant. He wrestles with his sheets so he can prop himself up a little better. “You were _plastered_ , dude.”

TK frowns. “We had that FaceTime call, though.”

Pats laughs. “Yeah, while I was trapped in pocket city.”

Something clicks behind TK’s gaze as Patty’s stomach takes a nosedive. 

“So you didn’t—”

“What the fuck was—”

They both stop talking. 

“What I’m saying is—”

“I don’t underst—”

Patty closes his eyes, as if that’s going to make the situation any better. “Dude.”

He can hear the wince in TK’s words as he empathetically replies with, “ _dude_.”

Pats scrubs his hands through his hair. Thinks back to last night. Hands, hair. 

He thinks that his undiagnosable heart cancer tumour might be flaring up again. 

Patty launches himself backwards, colliding with the soft, springy nest of too many fucking pillows for one person. He supposes that the ratio of pillows to people makes more sense now that TK is also in his bed. Fuck.

“Patty.” 

TK’s eyes are lighter in the sun, steel irises lit up with washes of saltwater blues and greens. An electric rush of pain zips through Patty’s shoulders. 

“What is this?” TK says, and the way he’s looking at Pats makes it into an earnest, serious question, and Pats just feels weird all over.

“My.. bed.”

TK rolls his eyes with so much force that Patty’s surprised he hasn’t pulled something.

“Patty. We spend _all_ our time together. We know each other inside and out on the ice _and_ in real actual life. You take me to G’s wedding as your date when I’ve already got an _invite_ , when you could’ve taken _any_ chick. I sent those photos to my _mom_ , dude!” TK’s lisp is out full force. 

“And like, when we’re drunk, we’re _all_ over each other, don’t even _deny_ it. I’m at your apartment _all_ the time. I buy us dinner, like, _all_ the _time_. You do my _laundry_ , I use your fuckin’ en- _sui_ te shower! I have like, _shit_ here!” 

Patty opens his mouth to say something, but TK’s too worked up for him to get a word in. 

“What does that sound like to you?”

Pats closes his mouth.

“If you say buddies, I swear to God.” TK is propped up on his elbow, leaning across the fluffy mountains of duvet. “Patty, there’s a drawer of my fuckin’ _clothes_ in your guest room!”

“That’s not like, a real drawer, man!”

“What d’ya’mean it’s not a real drawer?”

“I just—” Patty makes a noise somewhere between a groan and an extremely put-upon sigh. 

“I started crumpling all your shit up and shoving it there so you wouldn’t leave it all over my apartment!” He waves his hands in a wide arc to punctuate his sentence. “And then you kept _finding ‘em_ and _wearing ‘em_ and I just like, let it happen, I guess!” 

“So..” TK’s frown deepens. “You didn’t like, leave it that way for me on purpose?”

“Why would I do that on _purpose_?” 

TK squints at him, shakes his head a little. “Because it’s like.. romantic, dude..?”

Patty’s words burst out of him, frustration overriding tact. “What’s romantic about _wrinkled_ fuckin’ sh _orts_ bro?” 

TK pushes down the duvet where it’s bunched up near Patty’s shoulder. There’s a real intense look in his eye. 

“It’s not about the shorts, man. It’s about like, _feelings_ and shit.” 

Pats feels his eyebrow twitch manically of its own accord. He realised that TK is making weird pity eyes at him, the same way he gets in the locker room after games where Pats fumbles more passes than the number of minutes he’d played. 

“Patty, everyone thinks we’re dating.” 

TK pauses, and in the time that it takes him to inhale and say his next words, Pats has already convinced himself that he might be experiencing sudden onset kidney failure. 

“Because it _looks_ that way, bro. My mom thinks we’ve been dating since you got here. Sanny keeps leaving the apartment every time I bring you ‘round so he can give us like, ‘privacy’ or some shit. I’m pretty sure he Snapchatted Hartman about it last week.” He shakes his head. “G thinks we stopped hooking up last season and that it’s affecting my play.”

Patty chokes on his own spit, and TK snorts. 

“Trust me, those conversations are a _lot_ more painful in person,” TK sighs, slumping to lie back down. “But anyway, it got me thinking,” he says, “this works.” TK folds his hands behind his head, lets his elbow rest against Patty’s. “We work.”

“Like, you’re my bro. But there’s something else there too. I know you’re all _repressed_ and shit, but I know you feel it too, dude.” He turns his head to look at Pats, sweet and open and earnest, even though he’d just pronounced the word ‘repressed’ like ‘re-pressed’. 

Patty thinks he can feel his nervous system shutting down. 

TK blinks. “Just like.. tell me I’m wrong, and I’ll back off, and we can never talk about this again.” Everything about TK is confident and obnoxious but like, weirdly accommodating, and this conversation is no different. Patty supposes it’s one of the things he likes about him most. 

Pats squeezes his eyes shut, copper and silver flecks bubbling and sparking behind his eyelids. 

“I don’t..” he grits his teeth. “I don’t know how to do this.” 

TK waits for him to finish, which Patty appreciates. He kicks a leg out, flips the duvet off his foot. 

“I just feel it _all_ the time. When you’re around, when you’re not around.. I feel all overwhelmed when you’re with me, and I don’t feel right, and like..” he swallows. “It’s _weird_ , dude.”

TK shrugs. “Not weird.”

Patty’s vision is swimming with colour, and he runs his knuckles across his left eyebrow. One of his shoulders is prickling with heat. 

“I mean, I think about you a lot too,” TK continues, and Patty feels him shift on the mattress. “Pretty much all the time. When I’m at the store and I see dumb shit you like. When I’m stuck in a boring conversation and think about how much better it’d be if you were there, dude. When I’m with you. When I’m drunk.” He shrugs again. “When I’m in the shower.” 

Patty’s eyes open, and he turns to stare at TK. 

“What? Too far?” 

Patty thinks about everything that’s led up to this point, everything that stretches out ahead of them. He takes a deep breath.

“I think it’s love, dude. Actual love. I think we love each other.”

TK laughs, loud and long. “Obviously, moron.” 

He yawns, scratches at his chest. There’s a lingering silence, where all Patty can hear is the blood rushing in his own ears and the sound of TK ruffling up his bedsheets as he turns on his side again.

“I thought that like, you knew that, and that you just like, needed to build up to physical stuff. Or that it was the whole, y’know, _re-pressed_ thing and that you weren’t into it.”

Patty wonders where TK learned that word, whether Giroux and his accent are responsible for it.

“Which is, like, _fine_!” He amends, throwing his hands up. “Whatever suits you, dude.”

Pats furrows his brow. “You thought I wouldn’t be into it?”

TK stills. “You sayin’ you would be?”

Patty brings a hand up to palm at the ache in his shoulder. He shrugs. 

TK squints at him for a long moment. “C’mere then, you fuckin’ dumbass.”

* * *

They work up to something resembling a relationship. Which isn’t actually that far off from their current set-up. 

Patty still feels like he wasn’t in on that particular joke the entire time it was happening. 

“If you ate all the bacon last night I’m gonna fuckin’ _sauce_ you, dude,” TK announces a couple weeks later, skidding through the threshold of Patty’s room mismatched socks and a pair of boxers with the Wheat Kings logo printed on it a bazillion times. Patty still doesn’t know where the hell TK got those.

He rolls over. “Bottom shelf of the freezer.”

TK slaps him on the ass. “Legend.”

Patty can no longer make eye contact with Giroux outside of a team setting, and both Sanny and Hartman have been sworn to absolute secrecy. Pats pries his eyes open a little, squints at their shelf of gifts from Gritty. 

“ _Grelf_ ,” TK had said at the DIY section of the store with a scary amount of certainty and confidence. 

“ _No_ ,” Pats replied firmly, grabbing a tasteful lightwash woodgrain plank and turning his back on the bright orange abomination TK had been pointing at. 

They’d compromised by painting a stripe of orange along the edge. Turns out that’s something else relationships have, and you can’t just sock the other person in the shoulder and call them a stupid dick. Which Patty had already done by that point, but like, the compromise afterwards was what counted. 

Right now it’s just his jersey and TK’s helmet, but there’s a small pile of washed popsicle sticks in the corner that TK wants to bring Gritty to see if it’ll give him a mini hockey stick. 

So, yeah. Pats is still shit-scared of Gritty. But he thinks he’s kind of getting over it. 

**Author's Note:**

> newsflash, asshole! sewer-creature-abomination gritty was a metaphor for homosexual desire the entire goddamn time!


End file.
